Humanists Take on the World

37 Samaritans

• Dustin Williams, Lauren Studley • Episode 37

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This time we talk about the Samaritans.

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  • (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaria)
  • (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Good_Samaritan)

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Humanist Take on the World, episode 37, The Samaritans. Welcome to another episode of Humanist Take on the World. I am Dustin, and joining me is Lauren. Hello! And today's topic is The Samaritans, which was Lauren's idea. A long time ago, but here we are. Yes, and it's a good one, because most people have heard about the Good Samaritan, and that's about it. Mostly from, um, oh, Jerry Seinfeld. The very last, like, episode where they, like, go to trial for not being Good Samaritans. The Good Samaritan law. Oh, right, right. So, for a refresher on the Good Samaritan, it is a parable from the book of Luke, where a lawyer asked Jesus, how can someone be saved? And instead of answering, be a good person, help others, he tells a story about a priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan, who do not walk into a bar, but instead pass by a guy who was mugged and beaten nearly to death. The priest ignores him, because he doesn't, and just keeps going. The Levite ignores him and keeps going. But the Samaritan bandages him up, cleans him with oil and wine, puts him on his pack animal, takes him to the nearest town, takes care of him there, and then pays the innkeeper to continue taking care of him. Until he's all better. Okay. And the point of that is... Wait, do they actually explain the point of this in the Bible, or do they just tell the story and expect people to just glean from it? The end of the parable is Jesus then asking, which of them is saved? And the lawyer's like, obviously the one who did good. Yeah. And then Jesus' response is, go and do likewise. Okay. No context in there for why... Thank you. Not evangelicals. It has nothing to do. You've got to be a good person. So the priest would be somebody who was trying to stay clean, and somebody who might be dead would be unclean because of biblical law. The Levite, same thing. And Samaritans were hated by Jews. Okay. So the person that they all thought was bad, morally suspect, and following the wrong version of their religion was the one who helped out. Thus, he was actually the good one. Okay. Okay. So that's the good Samaritan. That's where that whole thing comes from. Okay. Yes. So for that to all actually make sense, we need to know who the Samaritans are. From the time of the New Testament, well, more accurately, the time the gospel stories is taking place, not the time when the New Testament was written. Samaria was the land between Judea and Galilee, where Galilee was mostly populated by Jewish settlers. Samaria was mostly not. It mostly had the people that had been there for hundreds of years. The indigenous? Yes. Those dirty indigenous peoples. And then Judea had Jews. And so Jews in the south, Jews in the north, and Samaria in the middle. Okay. For that to make more sense, we'd need to go way, way, way, way, way, way back. Okay. Another roughly thousand years. So if you look at the story in the Bible, there was the time period of the United Kingdom, ruled over by David and his son Solomon, and then the kingdom split into two. So the United Kingdom never existed. Okay. Okay. Just to make that clear, that's a legend. The 12 tribes of Israel weren't, because there were never 12. There is no counting in the Bible of the tribes that actually gives you the number 12. Well, because you have the tribe of Joseph being split into two, leaving 13 tribes, but then the Levites usually being left out. Left out, leave out. So what probably actually happened was the indigenous Canaanite peoples were the tribe of Judah in the south. Along with the tribe of Simeon, and the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh in the north. The tribe of Gad was probably Philistine, and several of the other tribes, including the Levites, were likely other tribes that had migrated into the area and integrated in with the kingdom of Israel, which was in the north. Not Judah and Simeon, all of the other tribes. And that kingdom in the north was the big, rich, powerful one. Okay. The kingdom in the south was not. Until Assyria. And when the Assyrians came, they conquered the northern kingdom. The southern kingdom was not as important, so they didn't care. So they left alone. Also, the southern kingdom was much more under the influence of Egypt, so possibly under Egyptian protection. So the Assyrians didn't bother conquering the southern kingdom, but they did the northern kingdom. Okay. And the Assyrians, much like if you do much reading into modern, relatively modern history with how the Soviet Union and Russian Empire before it and China throughout many, many, many, many, many centuries of moving people around, the Assyrians. So the next generation's guaranteed yours? Yep. Okay. The Assyrians were the, quite possibly one of the earliest empires to do that. Quite possibly the first empire to do that. So when they would conquer an area, they would take all of the smart people and move them to the capital. So if you had some kind of a specialty, you were some kind of a tradesman or craftsman, you got moved to the capital, they'd haul off a bunch of other people, and then they would move people and settle them somewhere else. And then they would take people from somewhere else they'd conquered and move them in and intentionally create a situation where the people there can't all speak the same language. And all of their leaders and experts and craftsmen and skilled laborers are all gone. So it's just a bunch of farmers and half the population can't speak with the other half. Therefore, they can't rise up and rebel. Anybody who could is gone. Right. So it was highly effective for the Assyrian Empire. None of those groups successfully rose up and rebelled. It did eventually collapse and was taken over by the Babylonians. But in the biblical telling of the fall of the Northern Kingdom, it is told as all of the population of the Northern Kingdom was taken to Assyria. And entirely different people were moved in. I mean, that just doesn't sound likely. It's not. Of course. Moving an entire population of a country or region. Most likely they took 20%. Which is a lot. Yeah. Now, taking 20% of the population away, that is more than decimating the population. You love the word decimate, don't you? To decimate a population is to remove 10%. That's enough to... And that is completely throw everything into chaos. And they more than did that and replaced them with people from elsewhere to make it harder for... Yeah. So, what... Now, some of the people that had been left behind fled. And they probably integrated in the South, bringing with them religion and ideas and history. And those stories got merged in together by the Jewish priests and scribes 150-200 years after the Northern Kingdom fell. And so, they integrated them in as, you know, these refugees that had moved in and been there for a while. So, they created stories and merged stories together to paint the picture of these are their other... The other people of their... Just a different tribe of their people. Okay. But an equally... When you're that disjointed... Mm-hmm. The point is to break up your community, but you can't help but form community no matter where you're at. Yeah. And to find those links. Otherwise, nobody would ever talk to each other, ever cooperate, and humanity would have died off forever ago. Right. And the... Then the Babylonian exile happened where Babylon conquered the Assyrian Empire and then continued on and conquered the Southern Kingdom. They hauled off all of the nobility and most of the priests and took them to Babylon. Eat the rich. Then Babylon fell and was conquered by the Persian Empire. Okay. And some Jews moved to Susa, the capital of the Persian Empire, and modern-day Iran. And most who had been exiled to Babylon were allowed to go back home. The Persians were also big fans. Cyrus the Great, in particular, was a huge fan of, let these conquered priests go back home, rebuild their temples, so that they will pray to their gods on his behalf. Because he let them go. Yes. Cast a wide net. Just in case this is a real god, I'm going to try and get some favor with this. And in the general pagan theology that would have been everywhere then, gods were all real, but they were all local. So if Cyrus wanted the protection of the Jewish god, that only mattered when he was in their territory. So he would want that favor for that territory. He would want the favor of other gods, including his own, when he's home. Okay. So cast a wide net so that you have the favor of all the local gods, of all the peoples that you've conquered. And it keeps you on the good side of the locals, if they can claim that God has protected you. Yeah. Cool. Did that work out long-term? The Persian Empire eventually fell, as all empires do. In that case, it was when Alexander the Great conquered them. He died, his empire was split. And generally speaking, the land we think of as Israel or Palestine went back and forth between the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids up in Syria. And those two empires kept trading off. Generally speaking, Judea was under Egyptian control and Samaria was under Seleucid control. Until the Hasmonean Revolt, when the Maccabees overthrew the Ptolemy Empire and got independence. Okay. They created their own kingdom. And as the Seleucid... What about the Egyptian influence? Yep. What about the... The Greek Egyptian influence. The Greek Egyptian. And the Greek Syrian influence. They all got kicked out. As the Seleucid Empire started weakening, the Hasmonean Kingdom started conquering Samaria. Okay. Which created a problem. Because Judea was full of Jews. Who worshipped their god in a very particular way. And Samaria was full of Samaritans. Who had their own temple. And their own high priest. And who worshipped the same god. But in a very different manner. In a slightly... Hundreds or thousands of years of separation at this point? Hundreds of years. They worshipped that same god in a big enough of a different way that they were viewed as being a separate religion. Just like we've got Jewish... The Abrahamic religions. Now. Yes. Absolutely. So, by the time of the Roman period in that area, when it was all under Roman control. So, the time of the Gospels. You had Jews worshipping following Second Temple Judaism in the province of Judea. And in the province of Samaria, you had Samaritans following the Samaritan religion. Okay. And then up north of them... Nobody liked. You had Galilee, which was land just north of Samaria that the Hasmoneans had conquered. And had... Is that where Doctor Who's from? The Gallifrey. Oh, bad. Close. No cigar. Gallifrey, not Galilee. They conquered Galilee and settled a bunch of Jewish settlers there. Puff the Magic Dragon. From Galilee. Who lived by the sea. Yes. Not from Galilee. Who lived by the sea. And the Sea of Galilee is just a little lake. Well, I mean, whatever you have, you're going to make it grandiose. Especially for songs for children. So... Attempts by the Hasmoneans to have settled Jews in Samaria, some were successful, but it wasn't as successful because it had a large enough population. They were able to drive out enough people, enough pagans in Galilee, that they could settle enough Jews to make Galilee a Jewish place. Now, in... That all changed, though, with the... Jewish-Roman Wars. Which the New Testament was actually written during the Jewish-Roman Wars. Talking about this other time period, but it was written during this one. Yeah. Okay. That started around 65 to 67 CE when Jewish people started rebelling in Judea, also in Galilee, and in Egypt, and in Rome, and Crete, and everywhere else. Okay. The Romans came in, and they destroyed Jerusalem. They tore down the temple, and eventually they expelled the Jews from Judea. Okay. Oh, I'm not familiar with that one. Said no one ever. The Samaritans were right near there. Okay. South? North. North. Sorry. North. Some Samaritans probably joined the Jewish diaspora and fully blended in with Judaism. And their descendants live on as Jews today. Others did not want to be a part of that because they weren't Jews, and they weren't part of that revolt. But to the Romans, they were indistinguishable from Jews. So, most of them ended up, that remained, either went to following the Roman-friendly pagan religions, or converted to Christianity. The Good Samaritan parable makes sense if you've got a bunch of Samaritans converting to your religion to throw in a story that makes them feel welcome. Hey, he's talking about us! Woo! It's kind of lost touch modern days, but I get that. Over the next, you know, nearly 2,000 years until present, Samaritans and Samaria were not much of a thing. It's not that the population was destroyed, it's that the population merged in with other... They just blended in with everybody else. Okay. One group or another, they blended in and stopped being a distinct, identifiable group. The Samaritan religion vanished as they converted to Judaism or Christianity or later Islam. The name Samaria keeps popping up, though. I mean, everybody's heard of it. The Crusaders, they wanted to bring it back. The British, when they took over the Palestinian mandate. And usually in a movie, if there's some, like, ancient angry god who's going to be, like, ravaging the world, some ancient Sumerian god or something. Sumerian and Samaritan are not the same. Oh, well, but the same region. Sumeria would be over in the... Assyria and Babylon area. The, uh... That's... Okay. Mesopotamia. Between the Tigris and Euphrates River. Modern-day Iraq. Okay. Okay. Sorry. Samaria was first, followed by Assyria, followed by Babylon. And then the Samaritans were... The Samaritans were a different group that formed from a mixing of the old Israelites and various other groups that got forced to move there. Okay. But what region? Where? Uh... Modern equivalent. Modern equivalent would be the northern half of the West Bank. Okay. Which is one place where its name is still being used, but only by Israel. Israel defines the north half of the West Bank, everything above Jerusalem, as being Samaria. The Palestinian Authority does not use that term and rejects that as being a valid term for the area. Okay. Most other countries in the world do not recognize that as a modern place name or regional name. Except the U.S. There's always an except there. Because of course. Because of course. Okay. I got Sumeria and Samaria... Yep....confused. Do you wonder why? Got it. Yeah. So, that is Samaria and Samaritans in a nutshell. Very cool. Definitely not how I, you know, is colloquially referred. I mean, I'm sure Christians know the good Samaritan thing from the Bible. It's been a long time. Like I said, mostly the good Samaritan law joke from Jerry Seinfeld. The show Seinfeld. The show Seinfeld. Yes. And, uh... And the horrible, horrible finale. That we don't like to speak of, but cannot deny exists. But aside from that, almost everywhere there is some kind of good Samaritan society or there have been good Samaritan nursing homes. So if Israel and the U.S. are the only ones who actually refer to that area as Samaria, then are all of those Christian or Jewish derivatives of... Those are all Christian, uh... Naming their organization after the character in the parable. Okay. Has nothing to do with any of its history. Nope. The region, the people, just that one story with that one person. And they just based everything off of that. Okay. All based off of a definitely made-up character in a story. Yes. Because the parables... Because it reads like a bar joke. Even the most conservative biblical literalists do not believe the parables are literal stories. They were Jesus making up stories to make a point. Right. It's not a par... That's the point of a parable. Mm-hmm. So at least... At least that hasn't happened. Give it some time. Somebody will start taking it literally. Okay. And there probably is some biblical literalist that believes even the parables are literally true. It's Jesus. He only speaks truth. Well, he smacks his own forehead and goes, No, you missed the point. All right. I guess that's it for now. I guess so. Yeah. And we'll see you next time. All right. Remember, not all those who wander are lost. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. Thank you.